Chapter 11
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Even they [Americans] may one day know fire and ⦠the sword ⦠for it is hard to believe that when one half of the world is living through terrible disasters the other half can continue ⦠learning about the distress of its distant fellow-men only from movies and newspapers. If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere
.
CZESLAW MILOSZ
T
HE
C
APTIVE
M
IND
(1950)
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2001
DAY 134 (11 SEPTEMBER): TBILISI
On this beautiful autumnal afternoon I wander through the picturesque quarter of Zemo Kala. In a sun-dappled park, two old men play chess under a tree while others watch on intently. The world is at peace.
At seven o'clock this balmy evening I take my seat to the back of a private box at the glittering Paliashvili Opera House. The curtain is about to rise on a performance of
Turandot
by (drum roll please, maestro) the Batumi Children's Opera and Ballet Company. Billed as the world's only juvenile troupe presenting works from the standard repertoire, the Batumi is an ensemble whose accomplishments I await with a dull dread. âPuccini by six-year-olds?' I wonder condescendingly as the recorded orchestra strikes up.
I need not have feared. The singing is pitch-perfect, the costumes are resplendent. Who cares if
Summertime
and
I Could Have Danced All Night
do not seem entirely of a piece with Italian tradition? American themes divert our attention, but inclusion is not the same thing as intrusion. âIf something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.'
Batumi, on the Black Sea coast, is the capital of Adzharia, virtually a breakaway province of Georgia. Whatever their motives, the Adzharian government and other sponsors of the company, comprising 250 performers between the ages of six and sixteen, invested A$150,000 in the dream of a children's opera.
If a dream can become reality, the reverse also holds true. The odd aria still coursing through my mind shields me from all thought of the real world as the taxi drops me back at Nika's pension. On the stroke of midnight I press the buzzer, the gate swings open and Nika's niece, looking more pallid than usual, whispers, âHave you heard what has happened in America?'
DAY 135 (12 SEPTEMBER): TBILISI
Nika appears on the balcony, her grey hair Electra-wild. âThis is the end of the world!' she exclaims, hands flailing. I tune into the BBC on shortwave while her niece fetches a black-and-white TV from the first floor. An incredulous onlooker is describing the fall of someone from the 104th storey of the World Trade Center, but already the âlive' report is taped history. The images I see, when the old set sparks into lifeâincluding the one of that airliner banking round to register its fatal impact on the temporarily spared twin towerâare spectral, like those long-ago images of Neil Armstrong planting white boots in moondust. These images, too, appear to come from another world: certainly not the one we have lived in until now. The times have lurched us forward, or maybe backwards, and it occurs to me thatâeven if Nika was being more hysterical than historicalâthe crevasse between yesterday and today is so jagged that those seven words she uttered may prove to be right.
This is the day my distant fellow-men have come to know fire, and the âsword', at least in the form of the box-cutter. My heart goes out to the victims, and not just the dead. Being caught in the crosshairs of history is something I can identify with â even if the analogy is imperfect (I, at least, am alive to tell the tale). Their lives were cut short in an apocalyptic second; my own trauma extended over months.
The acute and eternal pain inflicted on those hundreds of thousands of Americans related to those who perished, or who knew them as workmates, church-goersâmosque-goers, come to thatâreminds me that behind the gruesome pictures and war-size banner headlines lies a deeply disturbing fact: for these people, the world has gone mad.
Weltschmerz engulfs us all today but, while others gaze on scenes from Dante's Inferno for hours on end, I spy the madness through a keyhole. A world gone mad is something I have comprehended since 1990, because that's when mine did. Madness is being disconnected from everything you expect. One thing in my lifeâbut nothing in my lifetimeâwas as unexpected and horrible as this. I sleep, but fitfully.
Pre-dawn TV, BBC for breakfast, more Fukuyama pronouncements from Nika. The need to travelâto escape the 21st century, to grasp something permanent in a river swollen with flotsamâbears down on me. By a quirk of historical timing, my original plan to visit the town of Mtskheta, Georgia's spiritual centre, now seems far-sighted.
Only the religious trinket-sellers outside the cathedral compound detract from the timeless peace of Georgia's Westminster Abbey. Past the sadly solitary bronze bell lying on the ground, I enter the vast dark interior of the church between age-weathered sandstone pillars. If Catholic rites seem dramatic to one raised amid bare-bones Protestantism, Orthodox churches can only be described as melodramatic. Priests clad in all-black soutanes glide noiselessly to and fro, lighting candles which glow mesmerically in the gloom but do nothing to lessen the sepulchral atmosphere of the great vault.
Even with the silent tread of a wheelchair tyre, I alter course to avoid trampling on the grave of an elder of the church, or the tombstone of a king.
A stocky woman wearing a coloured headscarf rhythmically sweeps the slate floors and marble-topped resting places of the great and glorious. At the far end of the nave I can make out the fresco of a haloed Christ. A single speck of sunlight strikes the open palm, for all the world like his own votive candle held out as a timely peace offering to the âreal world'.
In the afternoon I am back in Tbilisi, wading through a deluge of shell-shocked emails at a suburban Internet café, when I turn to the cubicle behind me and see a big strong man blubbering like a baby. âAre you all right?' I ask, foolishly in the circumstances. He is an American, a law student on an exchange of some type. The details escape me; his shock is with me still.
DAY 137 (14 SEPTEMBER): TBILISI
This evening is spent in a bar frequented by expatriates, a rendezvous arranged before September 11 with the couple who gave me the lift from Azerbaijan. Now, with quite a knot of Americans among the clientele, the Friday-night get-together has the air of a wake. The TVs, which would normally be screening sports matches, are tuned to the memorial service from Washington. The sound is off, but pictures convey all the essential information: Bush speaking to the mortified crowd, the flag at half mast, Billy Graham at public prayer. To break up the sombreness, we getâinstead of ad breaksâincessant replays of those grisly, now eternal, moments of impact.
DAY 138 (15 SEPTEMBER): TBILISI
For the first time I consider the impact on my own plans. Do I carry on regardless? Should I wait and see how things develop? An email arrives from a Canadian friend living in the Philippines. âGO HOME, KEN!' it screams. That's one option I dismiss out of hand. As my travel plans don't include New York, where's the danger? Reason counsels me to note down the trend of events, and take my cue from that. Intuition isn't so sure.
DAY 139 (16 SEPTEMBER): GORI
After 70 rollicking kilometres, the morning train from Tbilisi judders to a stop in front of the station entrance in this ancient town, now best known as the birthplace of one of the biggest mass murderers of the 20th century, Josef Stalin. A large oil portrait of the original Man of Steel keeps guard over the entrance.
Well over half those of working age in Gori today are unemployed. A group of louche youths with swastikas tattooed on their forearms hang about outside the museum dedicated to Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, workers' hero. His childhood home is a humble log cabin. The clear impression is that young Joe learnt early on how to get by without the necessities of life, an attitude he would strive diligently to pass on to the masses in later years.
This man, or monster, arguably influenced more lives in the 20th century than any other, keeping in mind his mass deportations of whole nationalities as much as his purges and diabolical pact with Hitler. So it is fitting that the Stalin Museum, erected in 1957, is a âpalace' on a grandiose scale. Today the museum is officially closed but a security guard opens it up in return for a vodka-money bribe and somehow summons Larissa, the English-speaking guide, from only he knows where.
I take five minutes to haul myself up the grand marble staircase while the guard carries my empty chair to the first floor with cavalier inexpertise. Here, restored to my perch, I see the life of Stalin unfold through several memorial halls. The most remarkable exhibit of all is Larissa's unshakable belief in her hero as âthe most popular figure of the 20th century'.
âBut what,' I confront her, âabout the 60 million people who met a violent end during his quarter century in power?'
Larissa will have none of it: âHe is pictured as a very cruel man in films but he was not a harsh man. He was a very plain, ordinary and modest person, and used to listen to people.'
DAY 141 (18 SEPTEMBER): KOBULETI
I have taken a bus to the Black Sea, which means I have now crossed the Caucasus from sea to shining sea in just under a month.
Here at Kobuleti I have planned a two-week halt to work out the following five months' itinerary. For the next fortnight I will map out the route ahead, country by country, choosing in what order to visit them, where I will need to seek visas, where not. But now there is no way to know what lies around the corner: pleasant and stimulating times, a jihad or a fifth Crusade that will imperil the life of any Westerner who sets footâor wheelâon the Arabian Peninsula.
On calmer reflection, the best course becomes clear: wait to see where the Americans, or their enemies, strike. If the Middle East is too dangerous to contemplate, switch the original order and go to Eastern Europe first. Perhaps after a few months the Middle East will have stabilised and the way will be open to make it the last leg of the voyage.
DAY 142 (19 SEPTEMBER): KOBULETI
Dining tonight at a corner table on a pavement outside a local restaurant, the soup course is interrupted by a car ramming the pillar a metre in front of me and threatening either to come crashing into the table or explode. The driver keeps revving the engine until smoke pours out of the cabin, forcing him to eject while there is time to do so. Waiters hover, warily, but before they can usher me away to a less exposed table the driverâa wild-eyed man in a ragged wine-drenched shirtârushes into the restaurant and starts yelling incoherently. The waiters disappear, replaced by the apologetic owner offering a word of explanation:
âMorphinist
', which I assume means âdrug addict': Kobuleti is clearly not quite the backwater I'd imagined it to be.
ARMENIA: 3â23 OCTOBER
DAY 156 (3 OCTOBER): VANADZOR
At the Armenian border a Georgian immigration officer, spotting that I had spent exactly one month in his country on a 30-day visa, muttered something about âoverstay'. His mental calculator could almost be heard clicking over and dollar signs gleamed in the reflection of his stare. But, after ten seconds of suspense even he had to concede the truth in the old rhyme: âThirty days hath September â¦' I will say this for him: he managed a gracious chuckle while bestowing my exit stamp.
The most gripping thing about Vanadzor is that everyone, it seems, wants to leave it. On the main street a large crowd of grim faces mills outside the police station day after day. I am told they are there to pay bribery money for the next step in the emigration process that will take them, they all hope, to one of the promised lands: France, the US, and I suppose Australia.
The only guesthouse that can accommodate me is a real find: family-run, its elderly owners ply me with tea and homemade cake. This is my introduction to Armenian hospitality, and after a whole night of undisturbed sleep I am in for a hearty breakfast and a welcome surprise: the grandparents run a bakery out the back that makes my first morning in Armenia the sweetest-smelling of the entire journey. I head for the bus station laden with fresh gifts.
DAY 157 (4 OCTOBER): VANADZOR TO DILIJAN
A fellow passenger on the bus strikes up a conversation. His English is of the barest minimum but persistent, and eventually I make out that he is asking where I will be staying in Dilijan.
As I can never be 100 per cent sure in advance, my vagueness encourages him. Pointing to his chest, and then to me, he says, âHome!'
How can I say no? While it will be very embarrassing all round if it turns out I cannot use the toiletâwe are in the sticks of western Asia so I don't even know if it is a Western-style fixtureâneither of us has enough language in common for me to broach the matter diplomatically. So, I accept.
My new friend Samuel, it emerges, is one of the bus drivers on this line, but today he is returning home as a passenger. I needn't have worried about creature comforts, as I discover soon after our arrival in the ex-mountain resort of Dilijan. Samuel, Susan, Fruzik, Alva, Mane, Marie and Samson are an extended family. From the first hour when I am respectfully left to rest in the hammock on their porch to the moment four days later when I catch a Yerevan-bound
marshrutka
(minibus) at Tsakhadzor, these are days that travellers live for, to write home about and recollect years later.
Four days is long enough to meet the cousin who teaches English and comes for what I would call dinner, if the richest banquet ever laid before a non-head of state can merit such a mundane description. It is also long enough to discover that the Saruhanyan family own four cows (one of them kept in the garage, exposing Samuel's car to the elements) and that, from their bountiful milk supply, the grandmother of this extended family, Alva, makes the world's best, tangiest cheese. Scoured into tongue-tempting kiss-curls, it goes with the creamiest of butter on the most enticing of bread rolls.